Question Photons

Page 2 - Seeking answers about space? Join the Space community: the premier source of space exploration, innovation, and astronomy news, chronicling (and celebrating) humanity's ongoing expansion across the final frontier.
Status
Not open for further replies.
They do not know where to congregate but they do know, due to their "wavelike" fuzziness, how far they are from the edge of the slit, which itself has wavelike qualities. It knows if that distance is an integral number of wavelengths thus it knows how hard to bounce off (or be attracted to) the edge of the slit. The amount it bends is also a function of the phase of the photon, or solid particle, as it passes the slit. Thus interference patterns can be causes by constructive and destructive phasing of two beams and they can be created by single photons passing through at various distances from the edge.
 
  • Like
Reactions: Helio
They do not know where to congregate but they do know, due to their "wavelike" fuzziness, how far they are from the edge of the slit, which itself has wavelike qualities. It knows if that distance is an integral number of wavelengths thus it knows how hard to bounce off (or be attracted to) the edge of the slit. The amount it bends is also a function of the phase of the photon, or solid particle, as it passes the slit. Thus interference patterns can be causes by constructive and destructive phasing of two beams and they can be created by single photons passing through at various distances from the edge.
This is likely too much of a reach for me, but it sounds like the encounter of a single photon with the slit will have a random phase angle for the wave. But some phase angles will divert the photon more than others, and produce this effect. Is this guess even close?

The big mystery, apparently from a quick Google search, is that if we observe which of the two slits a photon passes, then it will behave like a particle, and no interference pattern will accumulate with multiple photons. I think this is right. [Once again I recall a certain dumb joke I'm unable to forget. :)]
 
  • Like
Reactions: Unclear Engineer
My understanding is that photons and solid particles both produce interference patterns, one slit or two, in groups or individually. Consider that a single slit has two sides to it and photons or particles bounching off either side can interfere.
 

Jzz

May 10, 2021
203
62
4,660
Visit site
If they only go through one at a time, they are obeying the HUP. They just 'decide' randomly. The 'decision' is just random.

Cat :)

This brings us to the Yang Mills theory that eventually led to the whole modern nuclear concept with its gluons and quarks and so on. The problem is that this was in itself a half baked solution. More than 10 years before Yang and Mills even met, Bethe had put forward his theory of how the hyperfine transitions in the hydrogen atom took place. Bethe's theory explicitly stated that the electron in the hydrogen atom was constantly undergoing self-interactions, by emitting and absorbing 'virtual' photons. These virtual interactions involved such low energies or infinitesimal times that they were to all purposes ignored by the macro world. Hence the term 'virtual'. This theory was later experimentally proved by Willis Lamb in the Lamb shift experiment. So what happened? Did the world and the world of physics in particular sit up and take notice? No it did not. Quantum mechanics continued with the asinine wave-particle duality assumption, ignoring experimental proof to the contrary. Bethe's theory gives substantiated proof that the electron maintains its stability around the nucleus through self interactions and not through being a wave for part of the time and a particle for part of the time. Think how different the world of physics would have been if quantum mechanics had admitted that they were wrong or even the possibility that they were wrong? The Yang Mills theory is based upon a massless medium and arcane mathematics that give form to Bethe's discovery. . Think how ridiculous it is to think that such a medium would be confined to the atom.
 
The object tends to need to be the perpendicular width of the photon's wavelength to be stopped. A 500nm wavelength photon is in an Eigenstate of positions across the 500nm, even though it is only .01 angstroms wide or whatever. Soot doesn't tend to extinguish it, but micro-meteorites can. It is like the photon is using a quantum computer to move forward and you have to black nearly all the eigenstates at once to stop it or the remaining qbits reform the eigenstate after passing the atom.
 
  • Like
Reactions: Unclear Engineer
"Bethe's theory gives substantiated proof that the electron maintains its stability around the nucleus through self interactions and not through being a wave for part of the time and a particle for part of the time.".

It is a wave in certain models we use, and a particle in others. It isn't a balloon you deflate to a particle and re-inflate to waveyness while it travels forward. While it travels around a micrometeorite, if the contours of a micrometeorites are a certain angle, it will deflect or diffract. Where it makes contact you treat it as a particle, and then a diffraction wave if still going or not longer there if it absorbed.
Find a glossy table or notebook computer. Have some lighting in the room. Tilt it so the glossy surface is 2 or 3 degrees from your eye level. Light is being diffracted. You can see this effect in most 1st world offices. It is only explainable by waves as the model when you look at light first-hand.
 
#31. Virtual interactions seem the default, agreed. Dismissing waviness of photons means mirages shouldn't be there. It was a university level argument with a Grade 3 argument attached to it via Grade 11 grammar. Impossible.
 

Catastrophe

"Science begets knowledge, opinion ignorance.
A Year before Voyager hit the outer planets I was reasoning with anthropology and evolutionary biology purposely ignoring what I knew to be true to try to win debates against adults. Then I chose the NASA mission future in every field. That is what Webb is supposed to be. The virtual photons have no way to curve around a well-painted wall corner even.
 
Any experiment that uses light and/or lasers is a flux dynamic, not a photon dynamic. Flux is very different than a single photon interaction. To see how one photon can pass thru two slots at the same time, one can only imagine such. Sources of light have multiple emitters. We need one singular photon. From one single emitter. Like a radio antenna. What does one photon look like? It does not look like a shotgun pellet.

Try to find a good video of a shock-wave. I like the one that shows that fertilizer plant out in Utah or Nevada or Texas or wherever it was. That shock-wave is a discrete dynamic. Discrete means non-continuous. Photons blink, they don't wave. It's an expanding circumference. A photon has the same structure and motion, only it's 3D and is an expanding shell of a sphere. The energy that you measure is only incident to you, not all of the energy of the photon. This is how one "photon" can pass thru two slits. And be discrete. The slits also remove previous divergence, and the photon starts diverging again. This results in a superposition of that divergence. An interference pattern.

The physical structure of one photon have the largest structures yet discovered. Much larger than any galaxy or group of galaxies. From one lowly photon. The largest one so far is 26-30 billion LY in diameter.
 
Last edited:
One of the things that seems to be ignored between the quantum and macro worlds of photons is how we could describe a "light" photon once it has been stretched to macro dimensions by cosmic inflation.

For instance, consider something like the 1.21567×10−7 m wavelength photon emitted by a hydrogen atom electron energy state transition, which then gets stretched to something resembling our communication radio emissions in the 2 m band.

What are the dimensions of that stretched photon, besides the obvious wavelength parameter? Assume it is traveling in the X direction, is it one wavelenght long in the x dimension, or more, or less? How many wavelengths wide is it in the y and z directions?

Yes, I know it would be impossible to detect a single 2 m wavelenght photon with only 10.2 ev of energy using typical radio receivers. But, apparently we routinely detect the same thing in large quantities when we use 2 m band communication devices. So, presumably, there are some photons with at least one dimension that is 2 meters.

The underlying point of my question is directed at the "duality" concept of photons being both waves and particles. We seem to believe that we can stretch photons, but doing so loses the particle part of their description.
 
A photon has point like characteristics and wave like characteristics at the same time. This is contrary to our experience in the macro world, but valid none the less.

We know the photon acts as a point since it arrives within a very short window of time. Also, when absorbed, it is taken all at one time by a very small object, the electron or proton.

We also know that, although it is a point, it can be anywhere at once. Its location is modelled by complex statistics. Although it is most likely to be found at one particular spot, at increasing distances the probability rapidly drops off but is never zero anywhere.

The likely location of a photon fills an increasing volume of space as its energy goes down. Radio waves take a relatively large antenna to be sensitive to the lower energy radio photons. But a smaller antenna does not catch half a photon. It is all or nothing. Thus it is quantized.

However there is no conservation of energy in moving from one inertial coordinate system to another. If I am moving away from a source I will see and interact with the photon at a lower energy, red shifted.

To an observer moving toward the photon, it is seen at a higher energy. Same photon, different frames of reference.

As the photon is observed stretched out, it will appear larger, require a bigger capture device but found to have a lower energy. As energy is lost the size of the volume where to find it goes up.
 
  • Like
Reactions: Helio
Bill,

A lot of what you just posted seems to be theory rather than observed fact.

But, what interests me is the idea of 2m wavelength individual photons. Do you still think they are absorbed or not absorbed, depending on whether the antenna is exactly 2 m long? And instantaneously, instead of the time it takes for a wave length to travel to the antenna? The coceptual problem is that a macro photon is interacting with quantum level entities like "free" electrons in metallic media.

With respect to conservation of energy by the space stretching process, we have been through that before. My interpration is that the energy is not lost, but takes more time to travel the distance that it has been stretched into, so that it all eventually reaches the impact point. That is the way that waves work, and the way that finite sized particles work with respect to mass conservation.. Do we have any actual experimental observations that show that energy is not conserved in stretched space?
 
All of the statements I made are from the mainstream explanations. These are all based on observation.

The tolerance in length of a dipole EM receiving antenna is very small. Any deviation from the "resonant length" will result in a dramatic fall off in intensity.
The higher the "Q" in the circuit the narrower will be the response. Q is a measure of efficiency. Pure capacitive and inductive circuits with very low DC resistance have the highest efficiencies.

I do not claim that photons are not stretched. Energy is conserved within any given reference frame. They are stretched in the moving observer's reference frame. Once received, the energy will be lower than normal. But in the emitting reference frame the photon never lost any energy. Two different reference frames, two different energies.
 
First, I don't think the answer that "All of the statements I made are from the mainstream explanations," is sufficient, because there are all sorts of incorrect "explanations" of things on the Internet. What I am asking for is what actual observations support those "explanations."

With regard to radio antenna efficiency and "photon size", I will observe that I can both transmit and receive radio signals on antennas that are specific fractions of the tuned wavelength, namely 1/4, 1/2, 5/8 and 3/4. That is why I asked what the "size" of an inflated photon would be in terms of its wavelength, and included the possibility that the "dimensions" of a photon "particle" might be more or less than its wavelenght parameter. There seems to be some difficulty reconciling that with the idea that the photon emitted by an electron jumping energy states in a hydrogen atom will not be absorbed in another hydrogen atom if there is any perterbation to its energy level at the absorption end, either by expanding space or having the two hydrogen atoms have a significant velocity difference. (Maybe a photon energy is the second Eigen value wavelength of something in the atomic structure, or what?)

Where we really got separated is in your statement:
I do not claim that photons are not stretched. Energy is conserved within any given reference frame. They are stretched in the moving observer's reference frame. Once received, the energy will be lower than normal. But in the emitting reference frame the photon never lost any energy. Two different reference frames, two different energies.

To get the motion aspect out of the discussion, consider that the hydrogen atom emits the photon, then space stretches and then stops stretching and then the receiving antenna is at rest with respect to the hydrogen atom when the photon gets there. It is still "redshifted" by the stretching of space, but not by differential motion. That is what I want to discuss, with respect to conservation of energy, and you seem to agree that the energy of the photon should be the same for emission and adsorption in that case. (I do understand that the energy measurements are not conserved between two frames of reference that are in motion with respect to each other - as in you previous example of the kinetic energy of a bullet and its massive target from the perspectives of the frames of reference of the target and the bullet.)

In the example that I am trying to discuss, the frame of reference is the same for the emitter and the receiver at the times that the emission occurred and the absorption occurred. It is just a portion of the duration between those points in time that space gets stretched, and that did "something" to the photon in the process. That scenario is similar to what is postulated for the "Inflation period" of the BBT. Although in the BBT, the expansion is not assumed to actually be zero rate at any time, it is assumed to have mostly occurred in a tiny fraction of a second (10^-35 to 10^-32 second after the "Bang"). So, to make things simple, I want to do the thought experiment with the expansion rate at zero during emission and absorption, but total expansion be a factor of 2 m / 1.21567×10−7 m = 16,451,833 within some instant between the times of emission and absoption. That expansion factor is peanuts inflation compared to what the BBT assumes for the universe during the "Inflation period", so I don't see how BBT proponents could call a foul on that thinking.

So, my fundamental question is: What is that "something" that happens to a single photon when it gets stretched by "inflation of space" from a quantum level entity to a marco level entity? It is easy to describe the effect in terms of waves, but how do we conceive it in terms of a single particle?
 
What specific assertion have I made that you want a reference for? You are asking for an open ended list.
|
A radio signal is a sine wave. Any length of antenna, when immersed in that wave, will pick up a signal. The magnitudes vary though. The closer to the actual wavelength, the more efficient the antenna.

This is the same reason a photon must have a certain size hole to pass through. The longer the wavelength, the bigger the hole is needed to pass it. Again, it is a matter of efficiency. The bigger the hole, the more likely it is for the photon to pass.

Once the photon has been emitted from an object in recession, it makes no difference to the receiver what the emitter did. The receiver sees the photon as emitted, including the relative motion due to space expansion.

Space does not "stop stretching". You cannot stop the stretching of space.

When space is stretched there is a velocity difference between emitter and receiver. This leads to a red shift and a lowering of energy at the receiver.
 
That was a compete dodge of the question.

You are insisting on conflating the effects of recession velocity with the effects of space expansion to aviod discussing the effects of expansion on photons.

My thought experiment is desgned to separate those effects, but you just pick nits with the design. The BBT itself drastically changes that rate of expansion, both increase and decrease at fantastic rates. So, there should be no objection to looking at the effect of expansion without considering the effect of a bit of residual recession. They are not coupled in the sense that you can't have more of one and less of the other. So, just assume for the purpose of actually thinking about the effects of expansion on a single photon. I already know how to use wave theory to talk about radio antennas, so that is superfluous. Get to the point about how to deal with a single photon with a wavelength of 2 meters, please.
 
Electro-mechanical physics has many more restrictions than spacetime and probability physics.

Probability, randomness and chaos are forbidden. Time and it's rate, and the length of length, are omnipresent and constant thru-out the cosmos. Space is not an entity, space is not a property, it's the lack of physical entity and property. A true zero. Some easily dismiss this concept because we measure things in space. Particles and fields. But they are only in temporary residence, they are just passing thru the emptiness. There is no e0 or u0 in space. There is no impedance in space. e0 and u0 come from the velocity of c. e0 and u0 is what space would have......to limit c.....IF space have impedance. But space does not have impedance to limit velocity. Acceleration is the only thing that can limit v thru space. And so far c is the fastest that we can find. We are limited to the speed of the force that is propelling the velocity. And c is the highest V we can find and use to accelerate with. The V of light is constant, not from impedance of space, it's constant because the acceleration is constant.

Absorption is greatly mis-understood. And a photon is NOT quantize energy. No absorption is necessary for detection. And no absorption is necessary for energy transfer.

Particles do not absorb energy on a radio antenna. Almost ALL detection of EM radiation does not include absorption. Particle absorption is a very conditional and restricted event. It takes a certain angle, and a certain strength or density, and a certain duration........for absorption to occur.

All particles have an electrical alignment and a magnetic alignment. These alignments are perpendicular. The emitted field has these two alignments also. When the field passes thru the particle, the field puts two torques, two twists, two accelerations on the particle. This tilts the particle....along with other particles receiving the same tilt. Now the particles are aligned.....and have a collective field. This collective field is what we measure from the photon. And as a radio signal, or light signal.

But these particles have mass, that is they have inertia. And as soon as the emitted field passes, the particle returns to it original postilions. This is the mass reactance to the stimuli. We measure both the stimulus and the reactance. The stimulus is a strobe, but we see and measure an oscillation. A back and forth. A wave. But the oscillation comes from detection, not from propagation. This transfers "jiggle" energy to the detector. NOT absorption energy.

When you measure the field energy from an emission, half of the energy came from detection, not from propagation. Half of that energy is from inertia of mass resetting itself.

As a propagation proceeds, it loses density because of divergence. But the duration of the delivered twist, remains constant. The thickness of the propagated shell remains constant.

Linear and angular momentum does not need mass. Momentum only needs density. So there is linear kinetic momentum from the photon, but it fades with distance. And the two angular momentums fade with distance also, BUT the duration never fades and remains constant. So because of the fixed duration, the detected frequency remains constant with distance.

These two angular momentums are the energy that is transferred to the detector. It adds jiggle to the detector and the detector warms up. This jiggle addition is an analog property, not a quantum property.

The only quantisized property of a photon is it's duration. And that can be adjusted, with detector motion. OR it can be adjusted with a moving reflector. It can NOT be adjusted with emitter motion. The duration of the propagation can NOT be altered with emitter velocity. Because the duration is emitted.....as a chuck, not a stream. This is very difficult to understand for most people. I am willing to go into the weeds and explain this in different ways.....for any that want to pursue this concept.

Particle absorption is a totally different dynamic. One does not see the absorption dynamic in our macro world. Absorption comes from an entirely different motion then what we have seen. I best explain it as a quantum change, or a step change, in physical size. Not a squeezing or stretching effect like we see here in our world. They are quick jumps in size. I have been called a crackpot for years about this dynamic. And now I hear where they have witnessed this dynamic with the high induction for the fusion reaction. They focus on a particle with lasers......hit it, and the particle shrinks. Making it much harder to hit again. Particles have quantum sizes, just like I have said for over a decade. And classical physics explained this motion one hundred years ago. Without ever seeing it. But no one has ever heard of it.
 
Status
Not open for further replies.

Latest posts